Misaligned incentives in academia: working together within a broken system

Slides for Kirstie's Port Talk at Goodenough College on 29 October 2019.

Abstract: Reproducible research is necessary to ensure that scientific work can be trusted. By sharing data, analysis code and the computational environment used to generate the results, researchers can more effectively stand on the shoulders of their peers and colleagues and deliver high quality, trustworthy and verifiable outputs. This requires skills in data management, library sciences, software development, and continuous integration techniques: skills that are not widely taught or expected of academic researchers. Skills that are unreasonable, in fact, to expect in one individual team member. Even worse, they are not sufficient for ethical, transparent, collaborative, participatory and well designed data science! In this after dinner Port Talk I will discuss the challenges of working collaboratively in the current academic incentive system, and give concrete advice on how early career researchers can access knowledge and support to incrementally change that system from within. All participants will leave the talk knowing that "Every Little Helps" when making their work reproducible, where to ask for help as they start or continue their open research journey, and how they can improve academic research to deliver on its most impactful promise.

Bio: Kirstie Whitaker is a research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (London, UK), senior research associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Goodenough College since 2018. Her work covers a broad range of interests and methods, but the driving principle is to improve the lives of neurodivergent people and people with mental health conditions. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and participatory citizen science to educate non-autistic people about how they can better support autistic friends and colleagues. She is the lead developer of The Turing Way, an openly developed educational resource to enable more reproducible data science. Kirstie is a passionate advocate for making science "open for all" by promoting equity and inclusion for people from diverse backgrounds, and by changing the academic incentive structure to reward collaborative working. She is the chair of the Turing Institute's Ethics Advisory Group, a Fulbright scholarship alumna and was a 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine. You can find more information at her lab website: whitakerlab.github.io.

Useful links

• The book: https://the-turing-way.netlify.com
• Github repository: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way 
• Contributing guidelines: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
• Online Collaboration Cafe outline and schedule: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/blob/master/project_management/online-collaboration-cafe.md
• Gitter chat room: https://gitter.im/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way
• Mailing list: https://tinyletter.com/TuringWay